Fuel Oil & LP Gas Dealers NAICS 457210

Apr 23, 2025 - Layoffs at LIHEAP

• Low-income households in need of assistance to heat their homes may feel the chill next winter after the Trump administration in April laid off the entire staff of the Low Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), Fuel Oil News reports. Administered largely by states, LIHEAP distributes more than $4 billion annually to 6.2 million low-income households nationwide to help with heating and cooling costs. The program also covers maintenance and repair to home furnaces. “They fired everybody,” the executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association Mark Wolfe told The New York Times. With no one left to administer the funds the program appears to be in limbo. Moreover, at the time of the firings, about $400 million in LIHEAP funding had yet to be sent to the states.
• Sales of heat pumps saw continued growth at the end of 2024, outpacing sales of gas furnaces for home heating, The Wall Street Journal reported in January. While new heat pump shipments have been outpacing gas furnaces since 2022, heat pump sales may have gotten a boost recently due to fears that the fossil-fuel-friendly Trump administration could do away with tax breaks and other financial incentives meant to spur US consumers to electrify their homes. “Over 2024, there’s definitely a substantial increase in the sales of heat pumps relative to furnaces,” Russell Unger, a principal at RMI who works on building decarbonization, told WSJ. Unger says he’s hopeful the heat pump incentives will remain available in the coming years. Currently, homeowners can claim tax credits of up to $2,000 for electric heat pump installations, and additional state-administered rebates worth thousands more are slowly rolling out into the marketplace, according to WSJ.

• Homes that rely on heating oil — highly concentrated in the Northeast — can expect to spend about 5% less this winter than last, with an average cost of $1,140, despite an anticipated 4% increase in demand due to colder temperatures, according to the Energy Information Administration’s Winter Fuels Outlook 2024-2025. The EIA assumes this winter will be colder than last winter across much of the US, especially in the Midwest, and that temperatures will be closer to average following last year’s very mild winter. Households heating with heating oil are expected to consume an average of about 400 gallons this winter with prices averaging $3.50/gallon, down 9% from last winter. Households heating primarily with propane will pay about the same amount as they did last winter on average across the nation. Propane is used for heating in 5% of households, mostly in rural areas.
• Sales for fuel dealers rose 17.2% in January compared to a year ago and were up 31.1% over December, according to the Census Bureau. Fuel oil sales are highly seasonal, typically peaking in January or February. Employment by the industry rose 1.6% year over year in January amid rising demand, according to the Labor Department. In February, the US Energy Information Administration revised its Winter Fuels Outlook upward, noting that residential energy expenditures for homes heating with natural gas and propane were trending higher than it had initially forecast in October, and raised its forecast for expenditures to 10% more than last winter due to higher energy prices and consumption. Previously, EIA had expected that homes mainly heating with natural gas would spend between 2% less or 7% more this winter than last.